29 january 2016

The Plume Air Report project started barely weeks ago and has already become an essential tool to know the quality of the air at a global level and to know what kind of activities are recommended (or not) according to the pollution levels.

This website collects public information (of over 11,000 monitored stations all over the world) on measurement of contamination levels, of gases and suspended particles in a total of forty countries in the entire world. To know the pollution data in countries that do not have recent measures, calculations that offer estimated results according to the meteorological situation and the movement of the suspended pollution are used. That is, from the countries from which there are no exact measures in real time, these are calculated based on the air’s movement and the pollution in the nearby countries. 

Here we see the air levels world map; the darkest colours indicate higher pollution levels while the lighter ones show lower levels. The hexagons with which the cities are indicated vary their size according to their population. The bigger hexagons show big urban centres, as we can see in India and China. 

Focusing on Europe, and more specifically on Spain, this is the corresponding map:

We can appreciate that there are low pollution levels and the web tags it as “fresh air”, the ideal to carry out outdoor activities as practising sport or eating at a terrace.  We must take into account the pollution levels when it comes to carry out different activities, since practising physical exercise with very polluted air can be highly bad for our health. The respiratory diseases are among the first causes of death in industrialised societies (you can read more about it here) and the physiology of these pathophysiologies is very complex, since this map is very useful to maintain our good health state. 

The list of available cities to know all their pollution details is not very wide to this day: as we see on the image, Valencia is not available. Here you can find the complete list of the available Spanish cities:

Spain only has a total of six cities and as we can see other European countries have even less, as it is the case of Sweden, that only has two cities (Malmö and Stockholm) in Plume Air Report. At the end of the complete list of cities there is an application form so that you introduce your city if it is not on the list yet. The website is being built and the map collects progressively more urban centres. This innovative project is being shaped and its success is due to every time we are taking more seriously the importance of living surrounded by good quality air.